Site and Trainer Review: Speaking Excellence with TJ Walker

They say you can’t argue with success. And why should you? Success is…well, success!

And from an outside perspective, the New York City-based TJ Walker looks successful. He’s a corporate public speaking trainer, appears on national TV to tout his stuff and has a pretty spiffy weekly newsletter and nice website packed with useful information.

And TJ does offer a lot of timely commentary on public presentations, presidential speeches, corporate or celebrity PR snafus and the like.

He’s built a good brand around the name TJ Walker, and has just released a new book “Secrets to Foolproof Presentations.” I haven’t read the book so I won’t offer a review, but I have seen a lot of TJ’s online videos and have read his newsletter for a couple of years.

TJ offers good solid, if somewhat obvious advice. But then again, a lot of public speaking advice IS obvious. Do the right things, practice, prepare, work at it and you’ll become a much better speaker. His advice doesn’t stand out as extraordinary, but I feel it’s his commentary on well-known presentations that is where he’s making his mark.

For instance, the morning after Scott Brown was elected senator in Massachusetts, TJ offered a two-minute critique and review of Brown’s speaking ability.  He compared Brown a lot to former President Ronald Reagan, and even said that Brown is a rising star and may be a potential future presidential candidate. Very topical, very timely.

As for Walker’s on-screen presentation, I can give him some high marks – and a few low ones. First, his speaking voice is fluid and confident, but not dynamic. He does pace a bit back and forth in front of the camera – and looks at the viewer so that you get the impression he’s giving you his full attention.

But one of his habits I find bothersome: his hand gestures. TJ seems to know what to do with his hands only about half the time. He often brings them together in a prayer-like position, which I find unusual and maybe even inappropriate for the situation. The fact that I notice it – and that he does it often – distracts me. I don’t feel it’s a natural gesture but a contrived one and would encourage him to work to remove that from his gestures. For some the prayer-like hand gesture may come across as co-opting a religious gesture, which may could be said to be out of place.

TJ keeps his reviews of public speaking moments frequent: he’s reviewed John Edwards’ recent admission of fathering a child, Pat Robertson’s claim that Haiti’s earthquake was due to a deal with the devil, and President George W. Bush’s recent return to the White House to assist in the earthquake-relief fund-raising effort.

On to his website, which has recently been re-done. The look is clean, spare and easy to navigate. The ’splash’ page, or front opening page, is mostly an advertisement for his books and corporate and media training. I do have a few quibbles – more minor things which I think his webmaster should take care of.

First, there is no “title” on the page, so when the page appears in a tab on a web browser such as Firefox, it doesn’t show Walker’s name, but rather shows a web address like this: “http://etc…”

Also, if you hover your mouse above the text “Speaking Excellence with TJ Walker” your mouse changes to a hotlink – even though there’s nothing there. So I looked at the source code and sure enough, there is a blank image there with a hotlink. As a longtime webmaster, this makes no sense to me.

As I continued to look at the source code (if you want to do this, click View > Page Source and you can see the source code for any web page), I was very surprised to see 148 lines of code that are links to a French web domain advertising Viagra and Cialis and other products. If this was my website and my webmaster I’d dump them immediately – wherever this code came from it has no business here. Just weird. And apparently TJ’s webmaster failed to include common ‘meta-tags’ to make the site more search engine friendly – stuff that’s really ‘web-design 101′.

Basic webmaster stuff and I’m surprised at the lack of attention to detail that exists on the site.

Overall, I have to give kudos to what TJ has done with his careers – he’s written books and produced DVD’s, has appeared on national TV shows as an expert and offers solid advice.

Get that website code cleaned up, TJ, and your online presence will be smokin’!

Website: TJ Walker’s Speaking Excellence

Tweet This Post